Battlefield: Bad Company Impressions by Kotaku

At last week's GDC, I had the difficult assignment of attending EA's DICE studio event. There, hanging out at some hipster nightclub, I was forced to drink free cocktails while grabbing whatever bite-sized gourmet morsels that were passing by on silver trays. While you'll hear more about the night as embargoes lift (Battlefield: Heroes and Mirror's Edge), I first want to tell you about some time I spent playing Battlefield: Bad Company multiplayer on the Xbox 360. You know, it's that Battlefield game coming for consoles that features the oft-fabled destructible environments.

I wish they wouldn't bullshit us. They don't make the buildings fully destructible because it's technically very difficult to do. But instead of saying "sorry, we just can't do that", they come up with some fictional excuse and say "But people wont like a flattened battlefield blah blah blah".

The fact is that if you destroy the bottom of a wall then the top of the wall should fall down rather than be suspended in mid air. But the calculations involved in doing something like that is incredibly complex. So Dice are going to attach a frame to everything so that when you shoot out the bottom of a wall, the top half wont look stupid hovering in mid air. Instead all the buildings will have a frame made from the hardest steel in the universe to help to cover up Dice's inability to make the environments fully destructible.